Heartbreak in Stamford (but fun anyway)

tl;dr super fast, but not careful enough! Could have been 20th (out of 750+ solvers), was actually 73rd.

I felt a little slow this year, but actually I was really quite fast. If I had had clean solves on all of the puzzles in the same times, I would have finished 20th. I haven't been doing a lot of puzzles lately, so my speed solving is a little rusty -- and in particular, I think my "speed solving carefulness" was just not well tuned. Plus my reading glasses aren't quite right, which was distracting. Next year, I'm going to work harder on making sure I have "crossword-optimized" glasses, and I'm definitely going to "train" more in the month or so leading up to the tournament.

It was an especially fun year socializing-wise -- I drove the round trip between Boston and Stamford with my daughter's boyfriend Peter, which made the time pass super quickly! I got to meet his friends, catch up with my old friend Pete Muller (who was again the backup MC for Will Shortz; but Will was doing great and didn't need a backup at all!), see various crossword friends like Jenn and Hollie, and mix and mingle with many crossword luminaries.

Here are my individual puzzle results (along with my usually "woulda-coulda" analysis):

• P1 -- 4-minute solve, just missing the 3-minute mark. Easy-breezy start; missed the 3-minute mark by 12 seconds and could definitely have been faster. 38 people finished in 4 minutes; just 12 people finished in 3 minutes.
• P2 -- 6 minutes. Another fairly easy puzzle -- I thought it would be harder, which slowed me down at the beginning (just being in the wrong mindframe for an easy puzzle), but still felt I was respectably fast. Eight people finished in 4 minutes; 11 people finished in 5 minutes; and 20 people finished in 6 minutes. That put me in a 15-way tie for 20th place after P2.
• P3 -- 9 minutes. I missed the 8-minute mark by just 10 seconds! (On the plus side, I had plenty of time to check the puzzle, but didn't have any errors anyway.) I felt very, very slow on this puzzle, and my time did drop me down in the standings. The fastest solvers finished in 5 minutes; 26 people finished ahead of me, and I was tied with 20 other people at the 9-minute mark. Now I was in 28th place overall.
• P4 -- 4 minutes (just barely). I finished with 2 seconds on the clock and SHOT my hand into the air -- I had checked as I went along, and the puzzle was very easy, so I was quite confident I hadn't made any mistakes. That did indeed pay off -- this time [foreshadowing...]. Four people finished in 3 minutes, and only 13 people finished in 4 minutes. After this puzzle, I was in 19th place, 2nd in the Sixties age category [yes, this is my first year in that group!! ulp!], and 3rd in New England. But it didn't last long...
• P5 -- 9 minutes.  This was pretty fast: the fastest solver finished in an amazing 4 minutes, but only 18 people finished faster than 9 minutes, and only 4 people finished clean in 9 minutes. I finished with only about 10 seconds in the minute, and made the (obviously wrong) call to turn it in. I should have taken another minute to check -- but even if I had, I might very well have missed one of the mistakes. Error #1: for some inexplicable reason, I had guessed/entered PAOLI as "Italian painter Veronese" instead of PAOLO (which in the gimmick of the puzzle (inverting the first-but-three letters) turns into APOLI, which isn't a word, instead of APOLO, which was the correct entry. Then I compounded my error by entering MLB instead of MLS for "Org. for San Diego FC and Real Salt Lake" -- I know these are not baseball teams; but my brain just said "oh! sports! MLB!" Those two nonsensical/wrong choices gave me "DERIBSI" for "Portia ____, 'Ally McBeal' costar," but I couldn't for the life of me think of who that would be. If I had just erased that area and worked back into it, I most likely would have correctly entered DEROSSI. Error #2: I also had a totally glitchy/inexplicable letter-entry error elsewhere in the puzzle that I should have caught on a scan (SASN/ERNNT instead of SASS/ERNST -- I knew the answers (obviously), so I really don't know why I duplicated the N at the crossing instead of correctly writing an S). They posted P5 and P6 scores simultaneously, so I don't actually know how much P5 by itself hurt me. But wait, there's more...
• P6 -- 7 minutes. A little slow, but perfectly respectable (fastest time was 4 minutes; 26 people were faster than me; and a whole bunch came in at 7 minutes along with me). But... I had the same kind of error as on P5 (entered SKYY/OLY instead of SKYE/OLE, when I knew the answers perfectly well). I can't decide if this was just two total flukes, or if there is some age-related glitch in my brain that is going to keep entering duplicate letters randomly!! You can kind of maybe come back from a single-square error and do OK, but it's just impossible to come back from four wrong squares in two different puzzles. (To put it into perspective, the total penalty for those errors was 470 points (two 150-point perfect-puzzle scores; four wrong-letter penalties @ 25 points each; and seven wrong-word penalties @ 10 points each) -- out of what would have been a total score of 11860.) That was enough to drop me into 81st place after P6. Sigh. I had to sleep on it, get up the next morning, and just try to turn in a solid performance on P7, but I knew it wasn't going to make a huge difference.
• P7 -- 12 minutes. I felt really, really, really slow on this puzzle. I was kind of tired, and kind of unfocused, and kind of unmotivated, since my brain knew it didn't really matter much. But I was solid and clean, so there's that. And only 31 people finished clean in under 12 minutes; so like I said, quite respectable! That pulled me up to 71st place at the end of the day [though later scoring corrections for other solvers meant I actually finished in 73rd place]. 

73rd place is still top 10%; I'm not complaining! And it's gratifying to know that my speed is still up there (and I've always been a little inconsistent, so that's really nothing new...) But man, I wish I had turned in those same times with no mistakes! If I had, I would have ended up in 20th place: 3rd place in Sixties, 3rd place in Other New England. If I were eligible for the B category (I think I have one more year in "A jail"), I would have been in 3rd place and would have qualified for the finals. 

As long as I'm fantasizing... I needed to take that extra minute on P5, so let's take a minute of speed away; but with just a little more focus, I think I could have been a minute faster on P1, P2, P3, and P6, and at least two minutes faster on P7, for a net increase of 5 more minutes. That would have put me in 13th place overall. 

Could I ever make Top Ten, my aspirational goal? To do that this year, I would have had to solve all puzzles cleanly, with the extra minutes from the previous paragraph, and another 3 minutes. So... maybe. It's not impossible. But I think maybe a few people would have to stay home from the tournament or have an inexplicably bad day. 😜